When ,in April 1941, Howard Florey learned that his best shot at world acclaim (as the only begetter of systemic penicillin) was at risk because Henry Dawson had got there first, the old claim jumper boot scooted over to America to shake a little dust.
Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
Together the pair agreed that most of the wartime penicillin effort should go into first synthesizing it - rather than merely scaling up existing natural penicillin fermentation technology and getting penicillin to the military and civilian patients dying for lack of it - now.
Richards (who never met a conflict of interest he didn't like) was mindful that Merck's cross harbour rival, Pfizer, was likely to be the big winner if natural fermentation - and not Merck's strength artificial synthesis - was used to produce this priceless new drug.
Left alone, Pfizer (with Henry Dawson's team assisting) was already on the way, during that Fall in 1941 , to producing enough penicillin to get the show on the road.
A pity then that Florey had to spoil the show ...
Showing posts with label a n richards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a n richards. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Wartime Penicillin Drama : 3 non-chemists promote chemical penicillin while 3 working chemists promote natural penicillin ...
Three middle-aged chemist manques who disgracefully put youthful dreams before the public good - at the height of a total war
Three of wartime penicillin's chief protagonists were men who, as youths, had hoped to become hands-on lab research chemists but whom necessity had pushed them instead into becoming medical science desk administrators.
Their names ?
Howard Florey, director of Oxford University's Dunn Path Institute , A. Newton Richards, head of the Medical Division of Vannevar Bush's famous OSRD war-science agency and George W. Merck , head of Merck.
All three greatly respected each other and worked as closely together as the American and British governments (nominally allies) allowed.
Wartime penicillin gave all three a second childhood as chemist manques and disgracefully, they ran with it* .
Even as a world at war panted instead for lots of disease-fighting drugs in any form , as long as they worked , were safe and were available NOW .
"Middle Aged Crazy"
For ten useless years (before , during and after WWII) they placed their highest priority on producing totally synthesized artificial (patentable) commercially viable penicillin.
They didn't get it and we still haven't.
If we had left penicillin just to them - as most at the top of the American and British governments had wanted - we'd never seen any amount of penicillin . Not during the war and not for long after, until newly elected governments came to their senses , cut their losses and moved on.
Let us now honour the three chemists who put public good before their chosen profession
The best solution perhaps for all time but certainly during a war emergency with its shortages of time and resources.
Let us now honour their names - as true patriots , as people who put the good of humanity before gaining more fame for their chosen profession.
These largely unknown and unhonoured heroes of the wartime penicillin saga made sure we had penicillin when it was most needed - D-Day and after.
And these three laid the groundwork for the kind of micro-biology technology that still produces all our antibiotics and many other medicines as well.
They are the American WPB's (War Production Board) Larry Elder , Glaxo chief Harry Jephcott and Pfizer chief John L Smith.
While we can show our disappointment for what Alexander Fleming, Florey , Martin Henry Dawson and all their co-workers did or didn't do with penicillin , it is my contention that all their actions were predictable , based on my through study of their personalities as displayed from youth on into middle age.
But I can't honestly say the same about Elder, Jephcott and Smith : they were the true wildcards of the whole wartime penicillin drama....
* I am mindful of former Nova Scotia premier John Buchanan who became a lawyer and a very very successful politician but who had really wanted to be a civil engineer.
Once in power, he drove the province into tremendous debt building anything and everything in sight : the once young engineer manque who finally got to 'drive the excavator'.
Most middle aged men - once they get money, a pot belly and grey hair - content themselves with finally buying the Corvette or Harley Davidson that Dad would never let them buy - but some (like Florey , Richards and Merck) do far more harm than that when they get a chance to go "middle aged crazy" .
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Florey quickly flees the biology of NRRL Peoria for the chemical comforts of Merck
Howard Florey probably spent no more than a few hours of his whole life in the labs of the NRRL at Peoria, Illinois where most of the fruitful work that gave us the antibiotics revolution was actually done.
Within hours, he had dumped his sidekick Norman Heatley there to toil on the rural farmer-like task of growing penicillin, because Florey preferred much more the urban chemistry-oriented approach of firms like Merck and Squibb and ICL.
Florey after all had wanted to be part of the then most glamorous part of science( chemistry) and only took up medicine as the easiest way for an Australian to get employment in scientific research (as a medical "doctor" , he hated dealing with patients and in fact, hated dealing with people in general.)
He remained a chemist-manque all his life.
Hence why he avoided doing any hands-on research at NRRL Peoria on increasing the biological yield of penicillin .
He much preferred the chemical synthesis approach of Merck and of its chief scientific consultant, A N Richards, new head of the war medicine section of the war weapon research organization, the OSRD....
Within hours, he had dumped his sidekick Norman Heatley there to toil on the rural farmer-like task of growing penicillin, because Florey preferred much more the urban chemistry-oriented approach of firms like Merck and Squibb and ICL.
Florey was no country hick and disdained 'farming' penicillin
Florey after all had wanted to be part of the then most glamorous part of science( chemistry) and only took up medicine as the easiest way for an Australian to get employment in scientific research (as a medical "doctor" , he hated dealing with patients and in fact, hated dealing with people in general.)
He remained a chemist-manque all his life.
Hence why he avoided doing any hands-on research at NRRL Peoria on increasing the biological yield of penicillin .
He much preferred the chemical synthesis approach of Merck and of its chief scientific consultant, A N Richards, new head of the war medicine section of the war weapon research organization, the OSRD....
Sunday, August 8, 2010
How to tell a lie - and prosper
On February 1st 1964, the journal NATURE ran a long feature article by Dr A N Richards, a foreign member of the Royal Society, a professor emeritus in pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania and the head of the medical section of America's all powerful science agency, the OSRD......
(Blogger ate about 1000 words right about here - I'll re-type it when my temper cools down - I have learned to print my blog posts out as PDFs right away since this 'incident' - ARRRGH !!!!!!)
......Fulton had been out in Central California investigating aviation medicine for the military and had wandered into a lab where a fungi researcher was working with this fungi ,without proper modern precautions, and Fulton was soon stricken onto death.
(Or he simply got it during the days he spent on a military base deep in this valley - the more likely explanation but a lot less colorful story...)
The disease was worked up by the American Military during the Cold War to use as a possible Germ Warfare weapon but in fact it was usually not fatal even if not treated.
But if it spreads from your lungs to everywhere else in your body, it was and is usually fatal.
Fulton eventually knew he was very sick from this fungus but he also knew he was also getting the best possible care one of the best medical schools in the world would naturally give to one of its most senior doctors - he wasn't excessively worried.
Nor where his doctors, until they took a routine swab from a unrelated boil he had on his abdomen to type it for sulfa treatment. Unfortunately, to their shock, it was filled with the fungus --- it seemed he was a goner and all kinds of "heroic' ( ie risky, foolhardy) medical interventions were suggested, as he seemed likely to die anyway.
Fulton had been telling his main doctors that his very best friend Howard Florey was working with a totally new substance, penicillin ---- produced by another fungus --- and finding it could kill an ever-widening array of microbes.
These doctors decided not to tell Fulton that his boil meant he likely faced a painful death and instead enlisted him to pull strings to get some penicillin for a fellow patient, Anne Miller.
They secretly would divert a bit of it, to see if killed off rival fungus and so save Fulton.
This was good peacetime science - but in wartime, the medical establishment tended to say, if it isn't a common military disease, let the man die - we need the penicillin more elsewhere.
Luckily for Fulton, the military had lots of bases in this valley and military men were getting sick and dying from this fungus - so a military need could be evoked - in a stretch.
Merck, the OSRD,and the COC had all gotten pitiful pleas for penicillin before the phone calls from John Fulton---- and turned them all down.
The calls usually involved SBE, an almost always fatal form of endocarditis that - in those days - usually stricken young teens and young adults.
These kids were considered by the medical establishment as the $Fs of the $Fs, as people not worth wasting penicillin on during an all out total war.
Martin Henry Dawson had said since 1940 that he felt that penicillin could cure SBE - war or no war - and they should be saved.
No other doctor in the world believed strongly that they should - at the time.
Most still didn't feel SBEs could be cured or were a priority, even at the time of his death in 1945 - by which time he had about three dozen cures - some cured for as long as three years with a repeat bout.
Norman Heatley of Florey's Oxford University penicillin team was working for Merck and reporting everything back to Florey in England.
He had already recorded in his diary, in November 5 1941 and December 3 1941, receiving pleas to provide penicillin to individuals dying of SBE, while visiting labs in Canada, Dawson's home country.
Merck, the ORSD, the COC hadn't helped young Joan Murray with her SBE then, so why help Anne Miller now ?
(Heatley, not a medical doctor, seems to have felt in his 1942 diary that Miller might have SBE.)
Let us, for a moment, return to Richards.
The thesis of Richards and all the other medical bureaucrats in charge of wartime penicillin was simple - "give us lots of taxpayers' money, leave us alone away from taxpayer scruntiny, and we will produce penicillin quickly and cheaply and distribute it objectively and absolutely without favouritism."
In fact, the very first case the OSRD/COC and Merck was involved in was a blatant case of favoring the mighty and the wise over the weak and foolish.
Once it was secretly told to a very few people - perhaps only Richards - that the penicillin for Miller was also going to go to help save Fulton, it made it likely that penicillin would be forthcoming.
In his own right, Fulton was considered a valuable part of the medical brains that America felt it needed to husband if it was to win the war --- he and his own doctor, Francis Blake, were high up in the war medicine committees deciding American health priorities.
The scientists found that even the politicians, the military and the business elite (and perhaps the general public as well) agreed that healthy, fit 1A scientists shouldn't be drafted - too valuable to the war effort.
The same thinking said penicillin was wisely used if it saved Fulton --- unwisely used if it merely went to save 4F useless SBE kids..
More importantly, Fulton was the very best friend of Florey, a man with few really close friends.
The other closest friend that Florey had in America was Richards himself.
Richards and Merck needed Florey on their side if they were to convert a largely British effort into a profitable venture for Merck in America.
While Blake secretly pulled strings for Fulton and Fulton openly pulled strings for Miller, the key person, I believe, was Richards.
The OSRD and CMR, the COC ,the NRRL,the British MRC and TRC, Merck and other drug firms , the NRC-NAS, the military Surgeons General, basically every official and semi official body connected to wartime penicillin all reveal a long paper trail of documents showing they usually bowed to Richards' dictates.
Luckily for Fulton, while the penicillin didn't do anything for his strain of fungus, careful nursing care kept him alive till his own body pulled him through.
He apparently never knew how he had been 'used' to help save his own life.
Anne Miller's case was not the first one involving penicillin in North America.
Dawson and Meyer's homebrew penicillin and Pfizer penicillin had treated at least 15 cases by March 14th 1942, the day Anne Miller got her famous first needle.
One had gotten penicillin - in fact history's very first needle of penicillin - and been cured - but not by penicillin.
Some had been cured by Dawson's penicillin - but the penicillin hadn't been injected internally as an antibiotic only dropped into an eye as an antiseptic.
A few cases of Dawson's had already been treated by the first commercial penicillin used clinically in North America - Pfizer lot number 696, first injected March 5th 1942, according to his co-worker, Gladys Hobby,in her lab records and correspondence file, as recounted in her 1985 book, PENICILLIN - MEETING THE CHALLENGE.
Because Pfizer wasn't in the OSRD-COC-Merck-Squibb agreement, its commercial penicillin wasn't counted by Richards and the OSRD when it came to proclaiming Anne Miller the first patient cured by penicillin in America.
Nor was Abbott or Eli Lilly, both huge drug companies back then, soon to do their own independent-of-the-OSRD/COC clinical trials.
But interestingly, the OSRD/COC were glad to add Dawson's cases, produced from this invisible Pfizer penicillin, to their total of the first 100 cases treated by penicillin in America.
AND Hobby says that Richards knew and personally approved Pfizer sending this commercially-produced penicillin to Dawson to use clinicallly , though Pfizer was not bound to listen to Richards at all.
A few of the most careful historians today say that Anne Miller was the first person cured by penicillin provided by the OSRD and I think this is exactly right.
But there was a vast world of penicillin activity around the globe between 1938-1945 and much of it was not directed by the OSRD or any OSRD-bodies in other countries - it was the work of individuals who like Dawson merely thought they could do something right now, not perfect or big, that might help save a few lives around them.
Ironically once those agape scientists and amateurs got to Doctor Mom, she lit the fire under Richards' ass that finally got us penicillin en masse,overnight, 15 years after it was first discovered...
addendum : I just discovered that TV megastar Dr Gregory House did reference Fulton's rare fungus disease in one of his episodes....
(Blogger ate about 1000 words right about here - I'll re-type it when my temper cools down - I have learned to print my blog posts out as PDFs right away since this 'incident' - ARRRGH !!!!!!)
......Fulton had been out in Central California investigating aviation medicine for the military and had wandered into a lab where a fungi researcher was working with this fungi ,without proper modern precautions, and Fulton was soon stricken onto death.
(Or he simply got it during the days he spent on a military base deep in this valley - the more likely explanation but a lot less colorful story...)
The disease was worked up by the American Military during the Cold War to use as a possible Germ Warfare weapon but in fact it was usually not fatal even if not treated.
But if it spreads from your lungs to everywhere else in your body, it was and is usually fatal.
Fulton eventually knew he was very sick from this fungus but he also knew he was also getting the best possible care one of the best medical schools in the world would naturally give to one of its most senior doctors - he wasn't excessively worried.
Nor where his doctors, until they took a routine swab from a unrelated boil he had on his abdomen to type it for sulfa treatment. Unfortunately, to their shock, it was filled with the fungus --- it seemed he was a goner and all kinds of "heroic' ( ie risky, foolhardy) medical interventions were suggested, as he seemed likely to die anyway.
Fulton had been telling his main doctors that his very best friend Howard Florey was working with a totally new substance, penicillin ---- produced by another fungus --- and finding it could kill an ever-widening array of microbes.
These doctors decided not to tell Fulton that his boil meant he likely faced a painful death and instead enlisted him to pull strings to get some penicillin for a fellow patient, Anne Miller.
They secretly would divert a bit of it, to see if killed off rival fungus and so save Fulton.
This was good peacetime science - but in wartime, the medical establishment tended to say, if it isn't a common military disease, let the man die - we need the penicillin more elsewhere.
Luckily for Fulton, the military had lots of bases in this valley and military men were getting sick and dying from this fungus - so a military need could be evoked - in a stretch.
Merck, the OSRD,and the COC had all gotten pitiful pleas for penicillin before the phone calls from John Fulton---- and turned them all down.
The calls usually involved SBE, an almost always fatal form of endocarditis that - in those days - usually stricken young teens and young adults.
These kids were considered by the medical establishment as the $Fs of the $Fs, as people not worth wasting penicillin on during an all out total war.
Martin Henry Dawson had said since 1940 that he felt that penicillin could cure SBE - war or no war - and they should be saved.
No other doctor in the world believed strongly that they should - at the time.
Most still didn't feel SBEs could be cured or were a priority, even at the time of his death in 1945 - by which time he had about three dozen cures - some cured for as long as three years with a repeat bout.
Norman Heatley of Florey's Oxford University penicillin team was working for Merck and reporting everything back to Florey in England.
He had already recorded in his diary, in November 5 1941 and December 3 1941, receiving pleas to provide penicillin to individuals dying of SBE, while visiting labs in Canada, Dawson's home country.
Merck, the ORSD, the COC hadn't helped young Joan Murray with her SBE then, so why help Anne Miller now ?
(Heatley, not a medical doctor, seems to have felt in his 1942 diary that Miller might have SBE.)
Let us, for a moment, return to Richards.
The thesis of Richards and all the other medical bureaucrats in charge of wartime penicillin was simple - "give us lots of taxpayers' money, leave us alone away from taxpayer scruntiny, and we will produce penicillin quickly and cheaply and distribute it objectively and absolutely without favouritism."
In fact, the very first case the OSRD/COC and Merck was involved in was a blatant case of favoring the mighty and the wise over the weak and foolish.
Once it was secretly told to a very few people - perhaps only Richards - that the penicillin for Miller was also going to go to help save Fulton, it made it likely that penicillin would be forthcoming.
In his own right, Fulton was considered a valuable part of the medical brains that America felt it needed to husband if it was to win the war --- he and his own doctor, Francis Blake, were high up in the war medicine committees deciding American health priorities.
The scientists found that even the politicians, the military and the business elite (and perhaps the general public as well) agreed that healthy, fit 1A scientists shouldn't be drafted - too valuable to the war effort.
The same thinking said penicillin was wisely used if it saved Fulton --- unwisely used if it merely went to save 4F useless SBE kids..
More importantly, Fulton was the very best friend of Florey, a man with few really close friends.
The other closest friend that Florey had in America was Richards himself.
Richards and Merck needed Florey on their side if they were to convert a largely British effort into a profitable venture for Merck in America.
While Blake secretly pulled strings for Fulton and Fulton openly pulled strings for Miller, the key person, I believe, was Richards.
The OSRD and CMR, the COC ,the NRRL,the British MRC and TRC, Merck and other drug firms , the NRC-NAS, the military Surgeons General, basically every official and semi official body connected to wartime penicillin all reveal a long paper trail of documents showing they usually bowed to Richards' dictates.
Luckily for Fulton, while the penicillin didn't do anything for his strain of fungus, careful nursing care kept him alive till his own body pulled him through.
He apparently never knew how he had been 'used' to help save his own life.
Anne Miller's case was not the first one involving penicillin in North America.
Dawson and Meyer's homebrew penicillin and Pfizer penicillin had treated at least 15 cases by March 14th 1942, the day Anne Miller got her famous first needle.
One had gotten penicillin - in fact history's very first needle of penicillin - and been cured - but not by penicillin.
Some had been cured by Dawson's penicillin - but the penicillin hadn't been injected internally as an antibiotic only dropped into an eye as an antiseptic.
A few cases of Dawson's had already been treated by the first commercial penicillin used clinically in North America - Pfizer lot number 696, first injected March 5th 1942, according to his co-worker, Gladys Hobby,in her lab records and correspondence file, as recounted in her 1985 book, PENICILLIN - MEETING THE CHALLENGE.
Because Pfizer wasn't in the OSRD-COC-Merck-Squibb agreement, its commercial penicillin wasn't counted by Richards and the OSRD when it came to proclaiming Anne Miller the first patient cured by penicillin in America.
Nor was Abbott or Eli Lilly, both huge drug companies back then, soon to do their own independent-of-the-OSRD/COC clinical trials.
But interestingly, the OSRD/COC were glad to add Dawson's cases, produced from this invisible Pfizer penicillin, to their total of the first 100 cases treated by penicillin in America.
AND Hobby says that Richards knew and personally approved Pfizer sending this commercially-produced penicillin to Dawson to use clinicallly , though Pfizer was not bound to listen to Richards at all.
A few of the most careful historians today say that Anne Miller was the first person cured by penicillin provided by the OSRD and I think this is exactly right.
But there was a vast world of penicillin activity around the globe between 1938-1945 and much of it was not directed by the OSRD or any OSRD-bodies in other countries - it was the work of individuals who like Dawson merely thought they could do something right now, not perfect or big, that might help save a few lives around them.
Ironically once those agape scientists and amateurs got to Doctor Mom, she lit the fire under Richards' ass that finally got us penicillin en masse,overnight, 15 years after it was first discovered...
addendum : I just discovered that TV megastar Dr Gregory House did reference Fulton's rare fungus disease in one of his episodes....
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